Podcasting with Excellence

Being a webmonkey, I have a different take on podcasting. The Dave Ramsey Show has gone from 200 to 350 radio stations in the last 3 years due to our incredible affiliate relations/syndication team. We have Matt Aaron (spoke at NAB in ’07), one of the Industry’s best engineers running a cutting edge studio. All we do is work on the feed and the mp3s.

Amazingly, that still leaves plenty to do to get your podcast onto people’s MP3 players. The iTunes store in particular is an interesting animal. It’s perhaps the largest directory of free podcasts. Apple publishes a basic spec, but after 3 years of working at it, we’re still learning how to improve.

A few weeks ago, the iTunes store featured a personal finance section on their podcasting page. During the peak of this period, our podcast rose to #2 overall (that I saw). For a brief period of time we passed This American Life, (a podcast that’s spent a lot of time in the #1 overall slot) but were then unseated by something relating to the season finale of American Idol. Mileage may vary, but for us that exposure roughly translated into an extra 3,000 subscribers per day.

Our team culture here is to look at everything we do here in terms of lives changed. Every book, every CD, every class membership, and every advertisement sold isn’t just a number on a profit and loss statement. To us, victory is the single mom across the street and the struggling family across the country who flipped the page on their calendar knowing that for the first time in a long time they had more money than month.